Laser Running.
So this week the circular took a trip to the grounds of Trinity College where we stumbled across an event called Laser Running. Bizarre. I know… So what on earth is laser running? Well, we thought the same thing, so we began to ask a few onlookers and competitors. It entails running 400 meters 4 times, and between each round, you have to stand 15 meters away from a target that you must hit using a laser gun. Sounds ridiculous, but its unbelievable fun to do.
(Above is one of the Laser Run guns that competitors use in competitions. It looks like something out of Bladerunner)
We ended up chatting to the head coach of the South African laser run team “Johan Windt” and one of his teammates “Marino Theunissen” who was competing in the men’s World Laser run finals. We were lucky enough to be taught how to compete in the games and use the laser guns.
We were brought to a big circle stand that had many different targets all around that people form all teams were practicing their aim on. We start with a distance of 5 metres and where thought a proper shooting stance. Hand on your stomach one leg behind the other and your other arm used for aiming and shooting.
For this section we learnt you have to hit the target 5 times within a time limit of 55 seconds, the goal is to hit the target 5 times in a row as fast as possible, so you can get back to running the next 400m quicker then your competitors. If you don’t hit the target 5 times within the 55 second time limit you have to place your gun down and run the next 400 meters.
Now after being made run 400 meters to hold up a gun one handed at a distance of 10-15 meters (depending on the skill level of the other competitors) is not an easy thing to do, you may remember how guns sway drastically in video games after sprinting around a map. Well, those video games weren’t exaggerating even if the gun only weighs a kilo, I noticed a lot of the time I was allowing the front of the barrel to dip while shooting just from the exhaustion of running.
Heres a short video on the concept of Laser Running:
(Laser Run video)
The best part about Laser running is meeting people from different teams all over the world and how each competition is in a different country, we heard that every other team has lots of members but the Irish team has a total of 10… So I think it would be a good idea to get more Irish people involved. It’s a fun competitive sport with good intentions. So I definitely think you should check out the website and see how you can get involved.
